Michael Greenberg Quotes

#1. Spinoza spoke of vitality as the purest virtue, the only virtue. The drive to persist, to flourish, he said, is the absolute quality shared by all living beings. What happens, however, when vitality is inverted, and instead of flourishing, one is driven to eat oneself alive?

Michael Greenberg

#2. For a long time I've wanted to apologize for my behavior that year, but I'm not sure how or even if it would be sincere. How does the man (woman) apologize for the boy (girl)? (132)

Michael Greenberg

#3. I mention a paradox of psychiatry: mental illness is recognized by the patient's distorted thoughts, but treatment is largely indifferent to their content. (104)

Michael Greenberg

#4. She is determined to learn to anticipate her worst bouts of psychosis, and head them off before they overwhelm her. "I'm trying to recognize when it's coming on," she says, "so I can get out of the way or at least drop to the ground like you would when caught in the crossfire of a shootout." (233)

Michael Greenberg

#5. Eugen Bleuler (who in 1911 coined the word 'schizophrenia') once said that in the end his patients were stranger to him than the birds in his garden. But if they're strangers to us, what are we to them? (26)

Michael Greenberg

#6. I rehearsed Foucault's argument that the presence of madness on our doorstep is good for us, for it reminds us the life we live is only one among several human possibilities.

Michael Greenberg

#7. Returning to the apartment, I feel a bitter tipsy pleasure at the extent to which my world has fallen apart.

Michael Greenberg

#8. Plato believed that insanity was essential to our nature and assumed that it held esoteric knowledge about who we are.

Michael Greenberg

#9. She thinks that if she gives it up, she'll lose the great abilities she believes she's acquired. It's a terrible paradox really: the mind falls in love with psychosis. The evil seduction, I call it. (186)

Michael Greenberg